iBUYPOWER Erebus GT Gaming System Review

Article Index

SiSoft SANDRA and Cinebench

We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2009, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks).

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA

Synthetic Benchmarks

All of these systems have Sandy Bridge processors inside, and with the exception of the iBUYPOWER’s Gamer Power system which has a Core i5-2500K chip (although it is unlocked, leaving it open for easy overclocking), the CPUs are comparable. Here’s where we begin to see the effect of that 4.6GHz overclock on the Erebus GT, though; the system’s Core i7-2700K is not just unlocked, but unfettered.

The Erebus GT’s Physical Disks score is so high that it kind of wrecks our graph. That’s the effect of the SSD compared to the much slower HDDs in the other systems. For what it’s worth, we ran the Physical Disks test on the Erebus GT’s HDD (1TB 7200RPM, SATA 6Gbps), and it still scored head and shoulders above the field at 156.46.

The memory score was somewhat surprising, as the Erebus GT has 16GB of DDR3-1600 RAM compared to no more than 10GB of RAM (yeah, 10GB, isn’t that weird?) in the other systems. Despite leading the pack once again in this test, the Erebus GT’s extra memory didn’t deliver much of an edge.

Cinebench R11.5 64bit

Content Creation Performance

This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Our system topped the field again, but not by much this time. Considering how overclocked the Erebus GT is, this is a little surprising.

These system and component tests are all well and good, but let’s see how our system did in real-world gaming tests.